Divorce Is the New Remarriage

The list of reasons to stay divorced from Cary Grant is surely very short. Certainly, if he says something to you like, ”Our marriage was good—it was wonderful!” as he does to Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday, you would fall immediately back into his arms. The list of reasons to stay divorced from Alec Baldwin, on the other hand, is quite a bit longer. And, when, as in the upcoming It’s Complicated, he leaves you for a thirtysomething, develops a paunch, and occasionally stands you up after you have spent all night making his favorite cake, you are not likely to regret the breakup.

Should the Grant/Baldwin comparison strike you as unfair, at least it arrives for a reason: It’s Complicated, a new romantic comedy about a middle-aged divorcee, played by Meryl Streep, falls into a genre of films known as comedies of remarriage. This genre, so-named by the philosopher and film scholar Stanley Cavell in his 1981 book The Pursuits of Happiness [2], describes movies about a divorced or separated couple that, over the course of the film’s topsy-turvy happenings, elect to give marriage another shot. A number of Cary Grant films, including His Girl Friday [3], The Philadelphia Story [4], and The Awful Truth [5], qualify. Cavell includes The Lady Eve [6], It Happened One Night [7], Bringing Up Baby [8], and Adam’s Rib [9] in the genre. More recently, there has been, according to David Edelstein, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [10] and also the egregious Kutcher-Diaz train wreck What Happens in Vegas [11].

Rom-coms typically end with a fleeting scene at the altar. Comedies of remarriage begin further along, at the point of divorce, or just before it, dissect the institution and then build it back up again. The power and sweetness of this genre, at its best in the 1930s and ‘40s, is that it champions an ideal of marriage wherein relationships, and the people in them, are not necessarily perfect but always, potentially, perfectible. It celebrates a pair who have the great American virtues of stick-to-itiveness, self-effacement, big-heartedness, and a knack for self-improvement and banter (especially banter), who decide that they are better off together than they ever would be apart.

Cavell writes that at their core, those classic ‘30s and ‘40s comedies of remarriage expose the “open secret in our world” that marriage is an active choice, not a product of law or fate or necessity. At the time, the idea that a happy marriage was a choice was revolutionary, but today that idea is not very powerful. What is a compelling choice, and what makes It’s Complicated a remarriage comedy for the modern age, is that the protagonists go through the motions of matching up again but then decide (spoiler alert!) to go their separate ways. In It’s Complicated, the notion that being your best depends on partnership has been replaced by the possibility that being your best depends only on you.

Jane, the heroine of It’s Complicated, has been divorced for more than 10 years. She is in possession of an irrationally gorgeous home in Santa Barbara, Calif., three beautiful children, a flourishing career as a baker, and good friends. Her ex-husband, Jake (Baldwin), has remarried a younger, sourer woman with a small child and has weekly appointments at a fertility clinic. At their son’s graduation in New York, the pair gets to drinking and dancing, and then, to bed. (In a lovably crass moment after their first coupling while Baldwin and Streep are still in bed, he reaches his hand over her vagina, and says, “home sweet home.”) Meanwhile, Jane’s attentive, milquetoast architect and wannabe boyfriend—played with slow growing charm by Steve Martin—hovers, suggesting himself as a healthier alternative to the smarmier, sexier Jake.

In structure if not in plot details, It’s Complicated resembles The Philadelphia Story, in which the blue-blooded Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) must choose between her ex, C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), and a big-hearted, formerly cynical journalist Mike, played by Jimmy Stewart (and, also, but oh-so-incidentally, her actual fiance George Kittredge, played by John Howard.) Like that film, It’s Complicated provides its heroine with two viable suitors, not, as in His Girl Friday or The Awful Truth, a viable ex-husband and a Ralph Bellamy, who never stood a chance. Yet, presented with two men, Streep’s Jane makes the opposite choice of Hepburn’s Tracy, ultimately throwing over her ex-husband for the new guy.

How, in this day and age, could Jane do otherwise? Jake is a cheater and, as he says himself, a cliché. Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story may have been an alcoholic, but his “gorgeous thirst” never included a taste for 30-year-olds. As Diane Keaton said in the recent New York Times profile of It’s Complicated director Nancy Meyers, this is a “fantasy for women over 55. You’re beautiful, charming and you get two guys instead of one.” That fantasy includes having your husband want you back—but necessities of self-respect, and revenge, dictate that you don’t take him. One can forgive but not forget.

Ironically, for all that, It’s Complicated, a movie about divorce, makes a more solid case for companionate marriage and the families they produce, than any of the more common, getting-to-the-altar flicks (like 27 Dresses [12], Bride Wars [13], and the upcoming Leap Year). The love, ease, and joy Jake and Jane take in each other, in eating together, in their children, in just sitting down to have a good chat while Jane takes a bath, is palpable and as important to their reconnection as the sex. Still, Jane has the right to reject it.

As good as marriage looks in It’s Complicated, divorce looks even better. (Designer plates, multiple boyfriends, and a sex life are included.) If the original comedies of remarriage are about reaffirming a marriage, It’s Complicated is, ultimately, about reaffirming a divorce. Jane and Jake’s ideal state is not partnership but separation.

Jane takes a good hard look at Jake and their rekindled affair and decides, nope, not again—they may love each other and have a family, great chemistry, and a way with the one-liners, but something is still wrong, and she will not forfeit her self-respect and hard-won equilibrium. Jane tells Jake that it took her a long time to finally feel OK being alone, and that she can’t go back to him.

To prove that this choice is correct, the pair later sit on a swing and agree they have no regrets, while Jake tells Jane she made the right decision. Meanwhile, Steve Martin’s character, who has gotten more charming with each scene, proves to be a lovely date when high and not such a bad kisser. Jane and Jake, who know and understand each other likely better than anyone else ever will, who make each other laugh likely more than anyone else ever can, have realized there is a limit to their connection. They opt back in to their divorce.

Compare this with the ending of The Philadelphia Story. Dexter and Tracy look at each other, flaws and all, and decide to try again. “Oh Dexter, I’ll be yar now; I promise to be yar!” she says, and he replies, “Be whatever you like; you're my redhead.” Jane and Jake are older than Tracy and Dexter; they are likely wiser; they have spent longer apart, have more complete lives and more at stake should they fail again—and isn’t that just a little sad?